A Liberating Lack of Local

Posted on by

I am a few weeks into full-time wormhole life.  It’s becoming quite enjoyable.  Aside from the fun of popping around and exploding all sorts of things in all sorts of spaces, so far the biggest appeal of wormhole life has been the sheer variety.

Many ways of playing Eve kind of prod you down a path of specialization.  The skill system rewards this.  Focusing intensely on one thing is usually the most effective way to structure a play session.  Usually splitting your attention between various flavors of Eve dilutes the whole experience.  Wormhole space forces variety, though.  The random nature of what sites spawn in the hole has a huge impact on what each day will bring.  Your statics and your K162s might bring treasures hidden inside tentacled Sleeper shells or PvP just waiting to happen.  You never know, and you usually have a few options to choose from.  Logging in and launching probes is the first step to finding out what the game is bringing you on any given day.

In the last few days I have mined gas and ore, cleared sites, avoided bubbles, run PI, and started planning some low-intensity industry, all with a friendly group of players that like helping each other out.  We have flown in every security level besides null, found some great payouts and some lackluster evenings of just chatting while keeping an eye on a combination of daytrippers and WH corps duking it out and hoping to catch us with our probes down.

All of this is not without effort or without risk.  But the balance of activities keeps everything fresh, and the almighty Bob of Anoikis seems to give enough nice payouts to make the whole thing seem worthwhile.  I have to commend the design balance in WH space.  It really is a great way to see a lot more of Eve than whatever rut you may find yourself in.

5 Replies to “A Liberating Lack of Local”

  1. All you have said is the life I have lived for 3 years now… due to the gameplay you described, you almost never hear any of us, the Anoikis “residents”, lambasting CCP over Wormholes. W-Space just works, as is, no need for iteration or massive changes or really, any real ‘new’ features to how Anoikis works of the basic gameplay in holes…

    What we want is a better ‘tent’ to live in (IE a POS revamp which I now believe is being designed from Lessons Learned and IS being worked on) and…. well, what I want for Anoikis more than anything… is WiS. That’s right, Walking in Stations… or, as I hope it will be delivered, DUST: Legion.

    A few years ago CCP had a dream of letting us out of our PODs and ships so we could Walkin Stations… that dream was foiled by a very poor management decision… to roll out Incarna’s character creator as a “Big Thing”, but to do so BEFORE there was ANY playable CONTENT for it.

    They dreamed of exploring say… Sleeper Stations… searching, ON FOOT, for tech, fighting, ON FOOT, against whole new types of Sleeper drones and even… fighting against other players who had followed you, or were there before you.

    I feel, very strongly, that the mechanics of Wormhole Space are fine just the way they are right now… The only people really calling for drastic change to W-Space, are people who don’t live there, but want access without the limitations that ‘naturally occurring’ wormholes enforce. But that is not what is needed… it is those very difficulties and limitations that make Anoikis the very special place that it is.

    The dream of FPS gameplay INSIDE Anoikis… now THAT is something that could really bring a whole new playstyle, excitement and value to the Tao of Anoikis.